“Ad fontes!”
USA, 1837—a short period of wintry weather occurring in autumn in the northern United States and in Canada—coined after ‘Indian summer’, from the fact that, because a squaw winter often precedes an Indian summer, they were seen as constituting a couple
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the problems with the “novel origin story for ‘Indian Summer’” put forward by Matthew R. Halley in Notes and Queries (September 2017)
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18th-century instances of ‘Indian summer’ in addition to the earliest one—including a 1791 figurative use of the term
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The name ‘Indian summer’ (late 18th century) reflected the fact that to the Europeans living in the New World, this was a newly-discovered local phenomenon. But similar phenomena were already known in the Old World by various names.
Read MoreIn ‘Indian summer’, ‘Indian’ merely denotes something other than that denoted in Europe by the simple noun ‘summer’—as in ‘Indian corn’ (‘maize’).
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word histories 